


On Tides, and Other Changing Things

by yonnna



Category: Baccano!
Genre: Drowning, F/M, References to physical abuse, attempted suicide, other than that it's a nice calm walk on the beach, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-04
Packaged: 2018-09-14 18:43:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9198272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yonnna/pseuds/yonnna
Summary: In some ways, hope has taught Niki fear.





	

**Author's Note:**

> me @ me: write something that isn't about niki  
> me five seconds later: how about I don't

When she is nine she tries to drown herself.

Back then she swears she can breathe water. 

Her lungs are filled with soot and smoke, and when the sea rushes into them she feels cleansed more than choked. The current wraps her in its warm embrace and draws her closer than any person ever has. The ocean is almost motherly, she thinks, though she does not have a mother to compare it to. She doesn’t struggle — she doesn’t even feel the _need_ to. The pain of beatings is bright and burning, but this darkness offers something else entirely. Salt seeps into her wounds, stinging but _cleansing_ ; cruel for the sake of being kind. The ocean is motherly, and loves lost children the most; it holds her in its quiet depths and cradles her to sleep, and Niki could swear she breathes water more freely than she has ever breathed air. 

It’s when they pull her out that it hurts. The slap that awakens her does not spare any force, and when she opens her eyes the sunlight burns in ways that the saltwater hadn’t. She spends an hour hacking up water that she is sure _belongs_  in her lungs and listens as her master tells her it will hurt more later  _—_   _the nerve of it,_ he yells: the nerve of his own property to dare try to break itself. Drowning would have been easy if she had only sunk beyond his reach; the ocean had offered her a way out, and his hand only offers her more of the same. It’s not a mercy. _Neither_ of them would think of it as a mercy. He hadn’t cared about _rescuing_  her; she’s simply an object it would be a hassle to replace. 

She gains fresh bruises and a lesson: death is not her harshest keeper. 

At nine she had tried to drown herself. It had been an escape. There are not many places that welcome runaway slave girls with open arms, but the ocean _had_ — _death_  had; death welcomes indiscriminately. It had been an escape, and she does not regret seeking it, but ten years later she has found that she no longer has anything to escape _from_. 

Death does not call her name the way it used to. The voices carried by the breeze now are the less familiar ones of the _living_ , and she fears how her fondness for them grows. 

“Miss Niki.” She looks down at the tug of her sleeve. Czeslaw will be nine in a few months time, yet even as she sifts through her memories she cannot see anything of herself at that age in his childlike innocence. He is not the _most_  outgoing boy, still shaken by the loss of his family, but there is a distinct difference between his shyness and her emptiness. “I want to swim.”

There is a distinct difference: he points to the waters and asks to swim where she had only thought to drown. 

“I don’t see why not. It’s lovely weather,” another voice chimes in before she can respond. She shakes her head slowly. 

“I’m sure it is, Mr. Fermet —” 

“Please, Niki, _Mr_. Fermet sounds so formal.”

She does not have anything to escape from anymore, because her new masters — _no_ , they would not have her call them that. Czeslaw is far too young to impose such authority, and Fermet, acting in his place, does not _choose_  to; he addresses her as a friend and confidant. He pays her fairly and never raises his hand or his voice. She is daily unlearning years of considering herself an object, a part to be bought or sold; she is daily being taught what it means to be a _person_. It’s a steep learning curve.

“Fermet,” she corrects herself, owing the fluttering in her stomach to the strangeness of it. “It would be dangerous for Czes to swim by himself. The waters are calm right now, but they turn quickly this time of year.”

She does not look him in the face when she speaks; it’s not something she has ever learned to do. Fermet has told her it’s considered polite in higher society, that it fosters personal connection, but she is not, and never will be, a part of that society. In her walk of life _polite_  means keeping her head down, averting her eyes whenever possible — polite means existing as little and as mutely as she can. She does not look him in the face when she speaks, keeping her eyes on Czeslaw as he continues to gesture meekly to the sea, but she glimpses a smile out of the corner of her eye. 

“I trust your say on it. After all, you’re more accustomed to the area than we are.” She expects there to be something biting in his tone — if she had contradicted any of her former masters so brazenly offence would have been the least of her worries, but she reminds herself again that Fermet does not contend to _own_  her. When he speaks it is with a new intonation which she is told is called _respect_. “The children don’t swim at all this time of year?”

“They do,” she answers, tracing lines in the sand with the toe of her shoe. “But children also drown.”

She forgets, for a moment, that Czeslaw is so distinctly different than she had been at his age; she forgets that he is not numb to such realities until she feels his hand grip hers a bit tighter. 

“Not often,” she lies. The sea has taken a thousand nameless souls in her short life; in towns like these people disappear every day, and only the waters themselves known the details of each tragedy. Czeslaw’s fears calmed, she turns her head to watch the waves. “But it happens.”

She recalls one summer a boy from the workshop, luckier than she, had succeeded where she had failed. When he visits her in her dreams his hands are icy and wet, and he tells her that if she takes them he can lead her somewhere better but they slip through her grip every time. 

“Of course,” He nods. “Still, I don’t want to disappoint Czes. Surely he’ll be safe if you’re with him.”

“If I’m..?” She pauses. The tide drifts out just far enough to kiss the soles of her shoes, and she remembers being swept away by it. She wonders if she could ever breathe water; when she imagines drowning now it is aching lungs and a tightening airway. When she imagines drowning now it is just _drowning_. This isn’t the place she wants to die. 

“I don’t know how to swim,” she admits, more easily than she anticipates. He tends to have this effect; things she never expects to say aloud are spoken unprompted in his presence. 

“You were never taught?”

“I was never taught _much_.” She narrows her eyes, but not at him. 

“What a shame.” 

He is silent, and for a second she thinks he may offer to teach her, but she dismisses the thought immediately; what good would it be for her to know? There isn’t anywhere for her to escape to. 

(There isn’t anywhere for her to escape _from_.) 

“Does it scare you?” he asks instead. He has stopped walking, and so she stops too. 

“The water?” It doesn’t bother her to be around it, which, she supposes, is what he wants to know. She enjoys these walks with the two of them, and Czeslaw seems to enjoy the ocean — she wouldn’t want to prevent either. The simplest, most pertinent answer is _no_. 

Yet he has a certain effect on her. He brings out a certain need to divulge _truer_  truths than she herself usually acknowledges. The simplest answer is _no_ , and she does not say it. 

“It never used to,” are the words that come out in _no’_ s place. 

He smiles at this. 

She does not know what to call the emotion behind that smile; she only knows that it is far enough from the _pity_  she usually sees to savour it. Perhaps it is _respect_ — she cannot say, but it is enough to make her forget again that more sensitive ears are listening to her, too. 

“I wasn’t afraid of death, so why would I be afraid of water?” Her shoulders lift into a shrug. “If I drowned no one would have missed me. Someone else would have taken my place, and everything would keep going like it always has. At least it would have been over for me.”

She barely registers when Czes tugs on her sleeve and asks in a small voice: “Um... Y-You’re... not going to die, right, Miss Niki?”

She opens her mouth to say something, but she does not know what. The natural response is _of course_. Of course she’s going to die. She’s known that for as long as she can remember. But something stalls her. 

“No, Czes,” Fermet answers for her, ruffling the boy’s hair gently. “You’ll notice that was all in the _past_. I’m sure Niki doesn’t feel that way now.”

He always speaks so confidently, even on matters she questions every second of every day. He has never claimed to know her better than she knows herself, yet he _speaks_  as though he does, sometimes. She does not know how to respond to this certainty in the wake of her doubt. 

“Isn’t that right, Niki?” 

She isn’t scared of drowning — but then why had she faltered? She moves her feet away when the tide reaches them, no longer desperate for its embrace. At nine she had tried to drown herself, and now she will not set foot in the ocean; then the sea had seemed motherly, but now her own motherly instincts keep Czes far from it. She does not listen for death calling her name any more; she listens for _him_. 

“That’s right.” She nods slowly, though she cannot decide whether she is lying for the sake of soothing Czes or coming upon some new truth.

Fear had been a foreign concept to her when she’d had nothing and wanted only death; now she has more and wants _more_ , more than even she _knows_  she wants. _Does it scare you_? Her eyes never leave the ocean. Waves rise and crash, and she clings to all the certainty she has left: _it never used to_. 


End file.
